For the past several months, we have been eyeing a particular chassis coming from the deep, inner depths of SilverStone’s mid-tower manufacturing line, a potential masterpiece of engineering released to the mass market of enthusiast system builders with exceptional design traits and form factor qualities. Over the past few years of its foundations in the PC hardware industry, many have come to know SilverStone for its design philosophy of appealing to a wide range of specific enthusiast needs. In the computer case and chassis market, we have known the company to aggressively produce a series of uniquely designed products that often poke fun at higher priced competitor offerings due to their underestimated ventilation and heat dissipation capabilities.

When the company reintroduced its 90-degree motherboard mounting design last summer with the Raven RV02 chassis, we noted that it combined a mainstream product design with triple 180mm intake fans for the demands of enthusiast-grade airflow performance. After all, the properties of thermodynamics naturally insist that heat rises, leading SilverStone to construct an airflow layout where hot exhaust can be pushed out the top of the chassis. With the combination of a solidly built exterior and adequate mounting room for the most demanding multi-GPU hardware configurations at the time, we remained confident that the Raven RV02 provided all the amenities that any enthuasist consumer could want without holding back on unique aesthetic qualities to appeal to the mainstream market.

In December 2009, the company announced the Fortress FT02 chassis, a work of art and aesthetics combining two of SilverStone’s most distinctive computer chassis breakthroughs – the unibody construction of the Temjin TJ07 introduced in 2005, and the 90-degree rotated motherboard design of the Raven RV01 from 2008. But unlike the Raven series, the company’s engineers have now gone back to the drawing board and meticulously crafted a chassis with the vertical cooling layout of the Raven chassis and several notable design improvements, including a hot-swappable hard drive cage and an acoustically padded interior for maximum versatility. All in all, we have decided to test whether or not the Fortress FT02 is the company’s latest advancement towards a more streamlined, high-end aluminium chassis construction with better thermodynamic performance than its cousin and predecessor, the Raven RV02 and Fortress FT01.